The US negotiator Rob Malley said that there are only a few weeks left to revive the nuclear deal with Iran if it continues its nuclear activities at the current pace.
Malley said in an interview with CNN that if diplomacy fails to restore the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action JCPOA Negotiations restarted in November after a five-month hiatus, the United States withdrew from under Trump in 2018, there will be a period of escalating crisis.
The indirect talks have been suspended but Malley said he hoped they would resume soon. Iran claims it wants to develop a civilian nuclear capability, but Western powers say its stockpile of enriched uranium goes well beyond that, and could be used to develop a nuclear weapon.
Washington warned recently that it may be too late to revive the JCPOA.
It really depends on the pace of their nuclear process, said Malley, US special envoy for Iran. We have more time if they stop the nuclear advances.
If they continue at their current pace, we have a few weeks left, but not much more than that, at which point the conclusion will be there's no deal to be revived, he said.
He said that at some point in the future, we will have to conclude that the JCPOA is no more and we would have to negotiate a wholly different deal and we would go through a period of escalating crisis.
The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he was not going to set a deadline for the talks.
The remaining runway for a deal is getting very, very, very short, and I'm not going to put a time limit on it, Blinken told reporters. He said that we have a strong interest in seeing if we can put the nuclear program back into the box that it was in. If we can't do that, because Iran won't engage in good faith, we are looking at alternatives and options. The 2015 agreement gave sanctions relief to Iran in exchange for tighter restrictions on its nuclear program, which was put under UN monitoring.
Trump went on to reintroduce sanctions, prompting Tehran to disregard the deal's limits on its nuclear activities in 2019.
There have been recent rounds of talks that have stumbled on, with sanctions Washington is prepared to lift and guarantees from Iran to protect against the possibility of a US withdrawal.